The Information School

Mary Gates Hall Suite 370D Box 352840 Seattle, Washington 98195-2840

Phone: (206) 616-2543 Fax: (206) 616-3152 Email: jscholl@uw.edu

Website: http://faculty.washington.edu/jscholl

January 22, 2016

Divya Kothari

MSIM Candidate

University of Washington

The Information School

To Whom It May Concern:

My name is Hans Jochen Scholl, and I am a tenured full professor at the Information School in the

University of Washington. The following represents a recognition for excellent volunteer work.

This is to acknowledge and attest that MSIM candidate Divya Kothari worked with me as a research

assistant during the fall quarter of 2015 on a research project that studied the response to the 2014

landslide disaster near Oso, WA (also known as the SR530 landslide disaster).

In this research project over thirty incident managers, responders, and leaders from federal, state, and

county departments as well as from local municipalities were interviewed. These interviews were semi-

structured, and the interview sessions lasted between 55 minutes and over 4 hours and were audio

recorded. In a previous project phase all recordings were transcribed.

Using a cloud-based coding and analysis tool, Divya coded several of these interviews in a deductive

fashion along the lines of a previously developed and theory-based codebook. The code applications

and excerpts, which Divya produced, were of very high quality. The applied codes were checked

against other coders’ work to assure a maximum of inter-coder reliability. Divya’s work was found

highly reliable and consistent in these inter-coder reliability checks.

Coding and contextual analyses were performed by means of the Dedoose cloud service.

I can attest that Divya is a very proficient, fast, accurate, and caring research assistant who also shares

her insights and observations from the coding process with other researchers thus providing important

hints for the data analysis.

I can highly recommend Divya as a very careful, curious, and highly engaged research assistant.

Sincerely,

Hans J Scholl, PhD, MBA

Professor